dukha 2

Recently a lama who had spent some 40 years in the Chinese camps in Tibet managed to make his way to India. This was someone who had experienced all the horrors of torture - being sewn up in a bag and then beaten with iron rods and left for days to lie in his own blood and shit, you name it - When the Dalai Lama asked him if he'd ever been scared, he said that yes, he had - He'd sometimes been terrified he might lose his compassion for his captors, that he might come to see them as his enemy.
I'm not talking about cause and effect as a "written" - some sort of "given" - Suzanne.
Of course that can be - and still is being - used to excuse anything... and not only in India.
I'm talking about the fact that we live in an ever-changing nexus of cause and condition which - like tides - becomes this and that as the day may determine but to which we are intimately related by its being our experience. It is not someone else's experience, and it is just this fact that shows this relationship.
Of course there's a difference between a hangnail and having your nails torn out with a pair of pliers, between hitting your thumb with a hammer, even, and having all your knuckles smashed for you with same, that's not the point.
The point is that - to the person who's suffering - suffering is all-consuming if they want it to be. Even a small splinter, even a five minute delay in traffic, even the fact that dinner is not to their liking...
That these things are just nonsense and easily curable whereas the others are anything but is not the point as far as suffering goes - They can become enough to ruin a day, start a war, destroy a people, if we like... And, in their time, they have too...
What I'm saying is not that anyone is "responsible for their suffering" because of some karmic decree. Karma means 'doing', anyway, not 'fate'... it means you can change things, modify things, not that they are ordained for you.
What makes a Tutsi child responsible for being bludgeoned to death is the entire situation surrounding it, including you and me, not anything the child itself has immediately done. The mere fact that it's been born the wrong colour, tribe, race, religion, class, caste, political persuasion, sex or language group is a karmic problem well beyond the individual.
Any "wisdom", however, that does not manifest forthwith as compassion is not 'wisdom' at all, it's just bullshit.
This has nothing to do with sitting on one's lotus throne and listening to the world weep. One the contrary, it's exactly what you are doing... Finding ways (albeit imaginary) to ease the pain (albeit delusional) of sentient beings (albeit symbolic)... They neither "exist' nor "don't exist", which may seem - to ordianry mind - a duality, but, in fact, is only one thing - one gesture, one hand clapping. In the same breath, they neither "exist' nor "don't exist", and that is the whole point - beyond all thinking, beyond all expression, beyond all ideas of compassion or knowing or of their opposites... Beyond all conception, the ultimate compassion - unsolicited - strives for the well-being of all sentient and even insentient (if such there be) beings.
This is not in the least to minimize pity, fellow-feeling and empathy, kindliness, gentleness and what is ordinarily referred to as 'compassion', but - as the Buddha said - 'I use your terms - your language - but what I am speaking of is far beyond what you generally understand by such terms'.
I don't mean to make you feel uncomfortable, my friend - Quite the contrary... I love you from the depths of my soul.

.-_-.